A conserved genetic signal for building neuronal pathways A new video! This one is just science, a cool paper I read way back when I was doing my post-doc. It left a strong impression on me, so I thought it would be worthwhile introducing it to all of you. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite papers, this one: It’s […]
https://freethoughtblogs.com/p....haryngula/2025/06/29

How night lizards survived the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs Yale University ecologists reveal a lizard lineage that rode out the dinosaur-killing asteroid event with unexpected evolutionary survival traits. Night lizards (family Xantusiidae) survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 million years ago (formerly known as the K-T extinction) despite having small broods and occupying limited ranges, a departure from the theory of how other species are thought to have persisted in the aftermath of the event.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-....night-lizards-surviv

Worse than I thought This knee gets worse and worse — now swollen and very painful. It is agony to get up out of bed, and once out, it’s painful to get up again, so I’m spending most of my time taking the path of least resistance and staying in bed, which is incredibly boring. I have to get […]
https://freethoughtblogs.com/p....haryngula/2025/06/27

Fossil fungi trapped in amber reveal ancient origin of parasitic zombie-ants Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers report that fossilized entomopathogenic fungi from mid-Cretaceous amber reveal some of the oldest direct evidence of parasitic relationships between fungi and insects, suggesting that Ophiocordyceps fungi originated approximately 133 million years ago and underwent early host shifts that shaped their evolution.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-....fossil-fungi-amber-r

Plant genome evolution shows both episodic and gradual diploidization patterns Polyploidy, or whole-genome duplication (WGD), is a major mechanism of genome evolution across the tree of life and is particularly prevalent in plants, where it facilitates the evolution of new traits.
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-....genome-evolution-epi